


2117, Revisited

by kaybella



Series: A Century of Drabbles [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: BoNfire Week 2020, F/F, F/M, Jewish Booker | Sebastien le Livre, M/M, no beta we die like the old guard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:27:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27938842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaybella/pseuds/kaybella
Summary: Nile knows what her family would have wanted for her so she does the damn thing right. She may never be able to go home, but she can make a new one, and bring parts of the before with her.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: A Century of Drabbles [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2045917
Comments: 6
Kudos: 28





	2117, Revisited

**Author's Note:**

> BoNFire Week Day 6: Kwanzaa+Hannukah / Cultural Exchange  
> WEDDING FEELS CUZ DAMMIT THEY DESERVE NICE THINGS AND SO DO WE
> 
> The highest and most respectful of fives to the glorious and ever patient [ nevermindirah ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevermindirah/pseuds/nevermindirah) , who acted as resource, sensitivity reader, and beta.  
> There are full culture based notes/sources at the end  
> Any remaining mistakes or misconceptions are my own.
> 
> This story is an expansion of drabble # 2117 in a big thing that I’m still working on but this absolutely stands alone and it doesn't need that context to make sense.  
> Cart before horse every time!
> 
> Alsothisisthefirstthingivewrittenandfinishedinanyfandomorinlike10years, Go Me!

Andromache of Scythia is older than marriage, multiple millennia older than marriage. Her people simply didn't have anything like it.

Quynh scoffs at the idea of it. Marriage to her was a business transaction at best and a trap, usually for women, at worst. She quite gleefully debates Nile about statistics and figures that prove her point and they agree to disagree — on modern marriage, at least.

Nicky and Joe aren’t married. They wear rings but by the time they even considered marriage a desirable option doing so felt redundant to them. After 500 year of pledging their love before God and all His creation, what good was there in pursuing validation from either of the faiths that they were so thoroughly disenchanted with?

Booker wears a ring but it's not from his marriage, it was repurposed from his wife and sons’ effects, an immortal man’s memento mori. The few happy parts of his first marriage that remain aren't something that he’d be willing to give to Nile even if she asked. Those were the vows he gave to Alaïs, a set of promises he was able to keep, and even keep a second time, and they will always be hers.

He doesn’t ask her for a ceremony and she doesn’t need one, but Nile knows her Momma. After 50 years when she decides to make it official? She does it right, because Lorraine Freeman would have wanted that for her. They don’t have vows like her mother would have expected, but they wrote their Sheva Brachot together, and when they say the words they have the same delicious, auspicious weight.

Joe paints them a beautiful [ ketubah ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketubah) and Quynh insists on officiating, smirking at them both the whole time. Copley the Fourth moved heaven and earth to help Nile retrieve her parents' wedding bands from her brother and his wife before they could be interred with them. In her backyard, under a handmade lace tablecloth that’s truthfully been in the family since before Freemans were freed, small and sweet, with a person who gives her the kind of love that filled the house she grew up in. She’s got Her Mother’s Cross and Her Father’s Ring, which just like her have survived more than anyone could have asked from them.

With all that love and then Booker himself, what more could she need?

**Author's Note:**

> The full English only text of this is exactly 707 words, and that makes me so happy, ya’ll dont even know.
> 
> These notes are kind of a doozy, but this story has a lot in between the lines about marginalized cultures so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> I truly cannot thank Nevermindirah enough for all their cultural handholding  
> I came into this knowing next to nothing about Jewish wedding tradition and I was blown away when I started looking into the vows and how well they suit this pairing and what they do, are, and can be to each other \o/
> 
> The text I composed for the Sheva Brachot, the wedding blessings, was taken from/inspired by these sources:  
> [1](https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-sheva-berakhot/), [2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheva_Brachot), [3](https://ritualwell.org/ritual/new-seven-blessings)
> 
> I am super sorry if I screwed up in the Hebrew Translation! I used Google Translate English → Hebrew in the 11th hour because the format of this didn’t finish coalescing until hour 10 minute 55. If there are any errors egregious or not, I can absolutely correct them, because I know from experience nothing can throw you out of a good story like a cultural mistake or a bad translation!
> 
> Niles dress! [This](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/53/31/85/53318562ab29708f502ecdf418573165.jpg) with accents like [these](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/08/d0/fd/08d0fd85bf38af968e18c9eb2bd129bc.jpg) on the neckline and “sleeves"
> 
> Booker’s ring, which is best seen in the moment where he is standing alone outside the Prospect of Whitby is comprised of Alaïs’ wedding ring, Phillipe’s posthumous Croix de Chevalier, Henri’s cufflinks, and Jean Pierre’s signet ring
> 
> The Chuppah ( the lace tablecloth) that forms their wedding canopy as Nile’s contribution has its own history that’s touched on and alluded to in the full story that this portion comes from but the details don’t really fit there either and it's important so they will go here!
> 
> Nile’s fathers family, the Freemans, are descended from the enslaved[Gullah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah)([x](https://gullahgeecheecorridor.org/)) people of the Carolinas. When White slavers abandoned Charleston during/before the Civil War, a ton of them abandoned their slaves because they were arrogant asshats and in the case of Niles ancestors, those slaves gathered up all their things and moved into the swamps and coastal lowlands and never left. If you remember Gullah Gullah Island, yeah, those folks! Her dad’s family would still have roots in that community, which is one that also has a history of military service coincidentally starting in the Civil War.
> 
> The tablecloth is something that one of her great great greats would have made for the person who claimed to own them and rightfully taken when they fled. My head canon is that that tablecloth is the Thesus’ ship of the Freeman family. It's been at every wedding funeral and baptism and Freeman hands have always washed and mended and cared for it. And now it’s Niles to care for.
> 
> It would look something like [this](https://i2.wp.com/www.adireafricantextiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/AS642.jpg?fit=1200%2C858&ssl=1), but in white silk or fine cotton with raised detail and tiny oval perforations at the borders. Those are the sort of woven details that would embellish something like this. The owner of the home that Niles ancestor lived in probably would have “asked” for a more complex design(it would still be geometric in nature) from the weaver that she claimed to own, but this stuff is hard to find. [That is the oldest example I could find, from 1880-1900](https://lady-writes.tumblr.com/post/636719546700578816/an-explanatory-comma-for-a-footnote-within-a)


End file.
